Colonial Redress and the Unintended Consequences of Global Opportunities

Wednesday, April 26, 2023
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
Philippines Conference Room
Encina Hall, Third Floor, Central, C330
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Claudia Kim
Colonial Redress and the Unintended Consequences of Global Opportunities

The literature on global norms and transnational advocacy shows that the rise of political and discursive opportunities has empowered many aggrieved local actors. Drawing on colonial victims’ transnational redress movements, Professor Kim adds to this literature in two ways.

First, by rejecting the common association between global opportunities and local movement facilitation and success, Professor Kim makes a counterintuitive argument that the early availability of opportunities can inadvertently hamper a movement’s efficacy in achieving its goals in the long run. Second, contrary to the implicit assumption that large-scale, high-profile transnational movements should fare better than smaller, little-known ones, Professor Kim demonstrates that the latter can sometimes achieve their goals more easily than the former.

In making these points, Professor Kim also responds to the calls to incorporate diverse forms of local-global interactions in our theorization of transnational activism. Empirically, Professor Kim looks at three Korean colonial victim groups — Sakhalin Koreans, Korean atomic bomb victims, and Korean “comfort women” — and their divergent paths to transnational redress.

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Headshot for Claudia Kim

Claudia Junghyun Kim is an Assistant Professor at City University of Hong Kong. She has written about U.S. military bases overseas, social and transnational movements, global norms and transnational advocacy, and Korean and Japanese politics. She received her PhD in political science from Boston University. Before joining CityU, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University's Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.